WHATISDIGITISED,ANDWHATISNOT

Disclosure is mandatory. In practice it is tables and pictures on the sites of dozens of companies, each in its own shape. Nobody can assemble a national picture from them today — the state included. On our map this field is empty, and stays empty until a source appears.

No single open register exists. Our 29,861 objects come from OpenStreetMap — volunteered data: completeness is not guaranteed and can only be spot-checked. A further 86,490 substations were found without a stated voltage and so are not counted among the 35 kV+.

The same: there is no open layer with object coordinates. The 22,046 objects on our map come from OpenStreetMap, with the same caveats about completeness.

Aggregate figures by region are published. Settlement by settlement, in machine-readable form — they are not. That is why our map says "gas nearby" rather than "gasified": these are different claims, and we will not substitute one for the other.

Neither a register nor a mandatory counting method. The standard in force regulates the procedure — how to write improvement rules — not the result. There is nothing to count, not because data is missing but because what to count has never been defined.

We got this wrong in the first edition and correct it here: a single federal register of municipal acts does exist, access is free and round-the-clock, and the official legal portal has an open data section and a read-only JSON API. But it is the carrier that is machine-readable, not the content: greenery requirements are written in prose, and comparing them across municipalities still means reading every document. Nothing can be calculated from them.

The national spatial data system does collect the information, including municipal and settlement boundaries, and serves it in vector formats through an interface. Full access requires signing in through the state authentication system. For an open country-wide calculation that is not enough: an outsider cannot re-check the result without creating an account.

The information is formally open, but is issued on written application in which the applicant states the section, the form and the medium. No bulk machine export is provided, and content and access terms differ from region to region. There are many systems and no comparable national picture.

The portal was closed in 2023 for migration and reopened on 15 July 2025. Per an open-data specialist’s review: 5,826 datasets from 739 bodies, about 100 MB compressed; 80.5% of the datasets hold fewer than a hundred rows, and only 1% hold ten thousand or more. For comparison, our single infrastructure map weighs 64 MB. The point is not that we are large — it is that the portal is small.

The system does have an open data section — that we confirmed. What we did not check: the composition of the datasets, their depth, and whether they support a calculation over the housing stock of a single block. The line stays here precisely because without it the cost of maintaining the built fabric cannot be computed, and that is half of any conversation about money.

Federal expenditure from 2016 onwards is available for download and analysis. But the cut we need is a different one — how much a given municipality spends on improving a given territory — and we did not confirm that it exists in machine-readable form. Without it neither the cost of inaction nor the payback of a standard can be calculated.